^^Well it is interesting but I think it'd be kind of unfair to compare sales in Japan and Korea, because the expected sales rate from the two countries are very different. Tbh, singers in Korea doesn't sell much anymore, in terms of physical album sales (especially) and digital sales. Music in Korea is very very discounted to the point where singers can't even provide their living from their music releases profits. Korean music industry used to have its glory when a singer selling hundred thousands of cds is a usual thing, but in the past decade the industry had been deteriorating, with the improvement of technology and all.
Besides, sales counting system in Korea is pretty curious, since there are some charts that count album sales, unlike Japan that only has Oricon chart that'd count all of the sales from every store. From what I know, Hanteo only counts sales from music stores, while Gaon covered sales from like supermarket sales too (like if you ever buy cd in Korean version of Wallmart lol). So if you ever seen any differences of sales between this or that chart it's because their system are a tiny bit different. One artist may have topped Hanteo chart, but it doesn't really mean that they sold more cd (in the whole nation) than the runner up in the chart, because maybe the runner up tops the other chart, lol.
These days, idols are like the only kind who can sells many physical albums, but even if I said it's
many, it's very different compare to sales in Japan, because in Korea selling 10k of physical album is already counted as good sales since people really doesn't buy cd there anymore, and because of that there are not much record shops in Korea. Well people still buy music digitally, but the prices are so low compared to digital music price in other countries. That's why idols do many things aside from performing to gain income.
To be quite frank, it was only male idols that could have sales as much as 100k (because of the huge number of fans), but Soshi has break the record and be the first girl group that always pass 100k mark with their albums (ITNW single only sold like 40k before but it's already an amazing achievement really). And they got the Golden Disk Award Disk Daesang for Oh!, which is an award solely based on physical album sales, and break another record being the first girl group to get that award. And if someone are arguing about this with Hanteo number, well as I said before, maybe they didn’t see the other charts because for Oh! case, they have huge sales from department stores too, which indicate that public (like casual music listeners, ordinary family members, etc) are buying the album too, not only fans.
These days 2NE1 is going strong and their sales are very good too. Maybe it's even safe to say that only Soshi and 2NE1 could sell that much album for female singers, since BoA had been MIA for too long :/
I agree with all of the songs that
love in music recommended. I love listening to their ballads and their unique songs like Wake Up and Destiny.
Random recommendation:
Spoiler:
Ah for Dear.Mom, I especially LOVE this performance (+ it has subs too, adding the amount of sadness by understanding the lyrics, lol).
There are childhood pictures of the girls and they looked very cute. Taeyeon cried a little, and I'm concerned about Tiffany because of the song itself and she wore a cast on her leg here because of an injury.
Gee Jazz+Rock version. One of their best song remix performance. Though yeah Rock Gee sounds weird =_=;;
Baby Baby. Yes this is a title song too lol but I love this song so much and even if the mv is just video compilation, it's really cute.